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Mineo Hayashi, Tokyo-born, studied with Casals’ first
Japanese pupil, Yoshio Sato. A soloist and chamber musician he now plays
in the distinguished Saito Kinen orchestra and has constructed an estimable
recital of solo cello works, cannily ordered, of real musical worth. He
has had the acumen to begin with the Cassado Suite and end with the far
greater challenges – technical and expressive – of the Kodaly; in between
comes a work by a contemporary Japanese composer, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Cassado, one of the outstanding cellists of his day,
composed a significant number of works, some for his own instrument, including
a concerto, but also a piano trio and the Rhapsodia Catalan. The solo
Suite is a more than welcome addition to the repertoire. It is a most
attractive work with a Preludio-Fantasia first movement that is distinctly
Spanish in texture and melodic impress. Hayashi’s lean tone is employed
in accommodating Cassado’s very high lying writing and with the several
moments of extrovert and flourishing rhetorical profile. In the dancing
second movement – a Sardana – there is a voracious and animated vocal
core. Hayashi is alive to the flickering momentum here but his range of
tone colours is relatively limited and not fully at the service of Cassado’s
imaginative writing whereas he is admirably successful in the Intermezzo
e Danza finale where we find Cassado effortlessly and successfully
embedding dance idioms into the fabric of the score.

Mayuzumi’s Bunkaru (1960) is an attempt to conjure and
evoke the Samisen, a Japanese three-stringed plucked instrument and to
fuse its sonorities and impulses to western cello technique. The result
opens with pizzicatos underpinning a melodic line of suggestible interest.
Notes are bent, an Eastern aesthetic evoked and the Cello seems thus to
undergo, in the eight minute span of the work, a kind of transformative
and illusory movement.

Kodaly’s masterpiece has never lacked for advocates.
Beatrice Harrison was an early proponent, though she never recorded it,
but it was Janos Starker who most indelibly stamped his leonine personality
on the work. Hayashi is consistently slower than the Hungarian cellist,
a considerable matter of three minutes slower in the second movement and
nearly two in the third and final movement. Starker is electrifying in
this work, binding the rhetoric with superb technical address and minuscule
gradations of tonal inflection and adduced meanings, Hayashi’s more considered
recording is somewhat more discursive – in the opening allegro one never
quite feels the architectural grip that Starker engages. Listen to the
opening phrases of the adagio and hear the range of dynamics and tonal
shading Starker employs; by comparison Hayashi, never insensitive, is
nevertheless relatively monochrome and predictable in his response. Starker’s
bowing is memorable here and he builds to the peak of a phrase with inexorable
conviction. Hayashi can’t match the older playing in tonal flexibility
or in delineating the rise and fall of the music – a considerable matter
in a work of this kind. But as I noted this is a good, thoughtful programme
and it is persuasively, if not always optimally, played. Pavane’s imagination
– and that of their soloist – is strongly to be commended.

Jonathan Woolf

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